TX - Ahmed Mohamed, 14, creates clock, shows teachers, gets arrested, 14 Sep 2015

[ATasteOfHoney]

If I make something that looks like a grenade & call it a hair barrette ... Could I be allowed in school? Nope....not in airports, not in theaters or concerts, not anywhere in public really.

Religion & heritage doesn't play a part in this unless we choose to make it a part in this.

Moo

 

[bluesneakers]

I wonder what people would think of Steven Jobs, Syrian heritage?

Here ya go...

Arab-looking man of Syrian descent found in garage building what looks like a bomb



via boing-boing

 

[EllieBee]

rsbm

It does not. And he was arrested after taking it to his teacher. This was a child's engineering project -- do you really think it should look like device engineered for mass production?

Why would a bomb have such a large display for the time? A bomb doesn't really need any display at all. If one thinks that bombs tick down with beeps and have digital displays, one has watched too many crappy tv shows and movies.

That was my first thought: that anyone who saw it and thought "bomb" had watch too many cartoons and crappy action movies.

Also, the child's name likely was a factor in the whole "bomb" hysteria.

I will bet Sally McGillicuddy's clock would not have garnered the same reaction. JMO.

 

[EllieBee]

He's doing scary things in his garage. Call Homeland Security.

Can I call them on my Iphone? Oh. Wait.

 

[EllieBee]

I worked in a high school for years. Schools get a lot of death threats, bomb threats, gun threats etc etc. Any time an electronic device with wires is brought onto the campus with no warning, no planning, it NEEDS to be checked out.

If that teacher had patted the kid on the back, put the clock on the desk, and it blew up, people would be calling for her dismissal if not her head.

Sad sitch for the kiddos who are required to enter a science fair project and then are harrassed and interrogated for doing brilliant work. No wonder our schools are pathetic. Keep dumbing it down, Amurrica.

Getting really angry, gonna take a break.

 

[katydid23]

There were wires inside the box connected to the clock.

According to police, Mohamed plugged the wires in his Vaultz pencil box into an electric socket on a classroom wall during English class.


The English teacher then impounded the pencil case.

A few hours later, four police officers summoned Mohamed out of his sixth-period class. They grilled him about the clock and searched his belongings.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/16/c...s-mistake-his-clock-for-a-bomb/#ixzz3lxBvQXCx


So he plugged in the wires during his English class? Was the teacher supposed to ignore a beeping electronic device?

I think that if it blew up then she would have been blamed. If you 'SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.' That's how teachers are trained these days.

 

[Nana]

How was this clock suppose to work?
I don't see a face on it or hands or numbers .
The teacher was suppose to what pat him on the back?
I really happy to see someone at the White House still watches the news!

 

[Sulamith]

He had it in his backpack in English class and it BEEPED. the teacher asked what it was and he opened it :

[video=cnn;us/2015/09/16/texas-muslim-student-arrested-clock-orig.cnn]http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-muslim-clock-bomb/index.html[/video]


He recalled showing one teacher the clock and her telling him that she thought it was "nice" but he shouldn't show other instructors, according to the paper. The teen put the clock in his bookbag but an alarm beeped in the middle of sixth period and Ahmed showed the teacher what he had, the newspaper reported.

"She was like, it looks like a bomb," he said.

"I told her, 'It doesn't look like a bomb to me.'"





How could she have ignored a beeping electronic device in a student's backpack? It was not an engineering class. It was an English class and he should not have been carrying around a beeping device with wires.

Hope that teacher never opens up a computer and looks at the innards. LOL.

 

[EllieBee]

I wonder what this school would have thought of that little crystal radio I built from a kit when I was in elementary school?

And no, Ahmed's clock did not look scary to me.

You subversive terrorist, you. Were you also wearing a tee shirt with a certain color or number that might offend one specific group who is apparently the only one allowed to declare what is proper and moral in this country?

 

[ATasteOfHoney]

.....tick....tick....tick....

 

[EllieBee]

Hope that teacher never opens up a computer and looks at the innards. LOL.

I do not think that is likely to happen. He/she probably thinks the little people inside would escape were he/she to open it up.

 

[Montjoy]

FWIW, I know what a bomb "looks like". Do you folks who are condemning this child know what a bomb entails?

In full disclosure, I do have a bit of sympathy for those who didn't know how to make sense of what he constructed. But I can't help but worry that people were worried because he looked, and his name seemed, Muslim. Seriously, does anyone think that his presumed religion was not an issue?

I don't want to be too hard on the teachers or administrators who inflated this event into a national security matter. They're also victims of a fear culture as well. But I hope against hope that people will be less blinded by fear and prejudice as time goes on.

 

[katydid23]

I wonder what people would think of Steven Jobs, Syrian heritage?

From wikipedia

father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (b. 1931), was born into a Muslim household and grew up in Homs, Syria.[9] Jandali is the son of a self-made millionaire who did not go to college and a mother who was a traditional housewife.[9] While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, he was a student activist and spent time in jail for his political activities.[9] Although Jandali initially wanted to study law, he eventually decided to study economics and political science,[9] and pursued a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that Jandali met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of German descent who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.[2][9] As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was Schieble's teaching assistant although both were the same age.[10] Mona Simpson (Jobs's biological sister), notes that her maternal grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating Jandali: "it wasn't that he was Middle-Eastern so much as that he was a Muslim. But there are a lot of Arabs in Michigan and Wisconsin. So it's not that unusual."[10] Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs's official biographer, additionally states that Schieble's father "threatened to cut Joanne off completely" if she continued the relationship.[2]

Birth

I went to high school with Steven Jobs and Wozniack. Graduates Homestead High School, Cupertino California, heart of Silicon Valley. Woz and Jobs were our AV guys. they came around and fixed the AV equipment and they were in the Electronics Club. There was no issue with Jobs's Syrian heritage but of course, we were at war in Viet Nam, not in the Middle east.

 

[EllieBee]

.....tick....tick....tick....

Yep. Clocks tick. My oversized wall clock is making that very sound as I type. And it is a CLOCK. But then, I am not named Mohamed.

 

[Nana]

Could someone please tell me what time that clock says it is please!!

 

[ATasteOfHoney]

Yep. Clocks tick. My oversized wall clock is making that very sound as I type. And it is a CLOCK. But then, I am not named Mohamed.

In general, I find ticking noises distracting....from clocks, bombs, it doesn't matter. The noise breaks my concentration.

 

[Sulamith]

How was this clock suppose to work?
I don't see a face on it or hands or numbers .
The teacher was suppose to what pat him on the back?
I really happy to see someone at the White House still watches the news!

It appears that the clock takes a 9 volt battery. Looking at the picture, it appears that it was removed because all I see is an empty 9 volt battery connector.

http://www.dallasnews.com/incoming/20150916-0916ahmedclock.jpg.ece/BINARY/0916ahmedclock

 

[katydid23]

Sad sitch for the kiddos who are required to enter a science fair project and then are harrassed and interrogated for doing brilliant work. No wonder our schools are pathetic. Keep dumbing it down, Amurrica.

Getting really angry, gonna take a break.

He was not entering a science fair. He was carrying around an electronic device in his backpack that was beeping in an english class. That was a stupid move on his part. There is a time and a place for everything.
Teachers are very concerned about school violence and they have to be highly aware of odd things going on.

 

[katydid23]

It appears that the clock takes a 9 volt battery. Looking at the picture, it appears that it was removed because all I see is an empty 9 volt battery connector.

http://www.dallasnews.com/incoming/20150916-0916ahmedclock.jpg.ece/BINARY/0916ahmedclock

He reportedly plugged it into the wall in his English class. That's what the wires were for.

 

[EllieBee]

He was not entering a science fair. He was carrying around an electronic device in his backpack that was beeping in an english class. That was a stupid move on his part. There is a time and a place for everything.
Teachers are very concerned about school violence and they have to be highly aware of odd things going on.

I AM a teacher. And we are not all reactive, paranoid people.

MOST of us celebrate a child's creativity. This chiild MADE A CLOCK. Could YOU do that? i could not.

But let us not celebrate creativity and ingenuity. Let us criminalize it. Which is why we are the Idiocracy we are.